3 Step - Core i3, i5, and i7 Overclocking Guides (now includes Sandy Bridge)

[Frag Maniac]

I basically have two problems with OCing guides. One, some try to make it sound too simple, and in reality every chip responds differently to OCing, so the rules of thumb can feel as if you're using nothing but your thumbs. Two, most of them are written for extreme OCing. Give me a break with this crap. Whatever happened to merely trying to avoid a bottleneck and actually stopping at that point vs trying to get as much as you can out of a chip? A max OC only stresses the CPU unnecessarily if you only want to game on it.

The more OCing guides I read, the less I want to bother with it, especially on a 1366 i7 chip. In reality the only slight bottleneck you're going to get is a fairly small percentage of frames on the more optimized games, so you never see the extra frames because you're still WAY above 60 FPS even with that bottleneck. On high resource games the FPS are nearly the same without an OC because those games are so GPU dependent the CPU doesn't factor in as much.

Bottom line, whether OCing for benchmarks, bottlenecks or bragging rights, it still boils down to something that isn't really necessary for most games.